What were the roots of the Rwandan civil war? What role did the international community play in trying to resolve this war? Did the peace process contribute to the set of circumstances in which genocide occurred? The perception of conflict in Rwanda is dominated by images of genocide. The civil war that preceded it remains little known and less explored. As a result of this knowledge gap Rwanda is seen as paradigmatic of the problems of international order associated with the post-Cold War era along with Yugoslavia and Somalia. Taking ‘conflict’ in Rwanda to include the earlier civil war makes the implications of the events of 1994 quite different.
The purpose of this chapter, in Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolution, is to reconstruct elements of the third-party process, so as to place the Rwanda genocide in the context of the regional and international efforts to halt the civil war. Root causes of the civil war are considered, as is the accompanying peace process. The chapter goes on to consider the causal relationship between these negotiations and the transformation of the conflict. It finds that, between the roots of the conflict and the possibility of its resolution, lies political elites willing to destroy a society rather than concede their own power. As such, it illustrates the perennial problem in conflict resolution. This case confirms the argument that solutions to the problem of elite interests must be incorporated directly into settlements.
It is found that the peace process failed to tackle the capacity of hard-liners. Conflict resolution theory would suggest two options in dealing with such opposition: Give those who are set to lose in the political transformation a stake in the new arrangements in order to minimise their destructiveness, or keep them out of new arrangements but ensure that they are unable to undermine the transition bargain. In the case of Rwanda it is found that:
- Had the Arusha process given the Rwandan extremists a stake in power, perhaps the neutral peacekeeping mandate of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) would have secured the transition
- Had the UN more fully understood the social roots of the conflict, the need for contingency planning with regard to a forceful opposition would have been apparent.
What broader lessons does the experience offer? The experience of Rwanda suggests a general, a specific, and a conceptual lesson:
- The general lesson links the roots of conflict directly to resolution. Both threads of conflict in Rwanda – the civil war and the genocide – can be traced directly to the impact of manipulation of social cleavages, in this case ethnicity, by political elites in competition over power
- The specific lesson relates to the perennial dilemma of implementing peace in the face of hard-line resistance. If future collapses of negotiated peace settlements are to be avoided, third-party intervention must be grounded on an analysis of the historical roots and social causes of the conflicts they address
- On the conceptual level, it is clear that conflict resolution is not a neutral exercise but forms part of a process of political transformation involving elites. A peace process potentially creates losers. Resolution of civil conflict must tackle directly the causes of violence and minimise the capacity of political elites to turn social cleavage into violent conflict.
